Media conference participants may have difficulty identifying other conference participants. A participant may be unfamiliar with a speaker's voice or a participant's face or the audio exchange may confuse a listener. In the latter case, a listener, whether speaking or not, may be confused if several participants are speaking concurrently or if there is a rapid exchange between multiple participants. In some cases, speakers may include his/her name “[t]his is Bob, . . .” or a listener may ask the identity of a previous speaker. The complexity of this issue may increase as the number of participants speaking, or contributing audio input, increases. While a listener may derive the speaker's identity from “context clues” within the conversation, in some instances, participants may not comprehend which participants are providing audio input.
Additionally, minimizing bandwidth consumption, or the amount of data throughput for carrying information, may be desirable. For example, while a physical connection for transporting data may have additional throughput, consuming communication link resources may reduce the throughput available for other data transfers, or may impact conference audio data transfer if a user happens to have limited network bandwidth.
Acceptance of media conference improvements may be limited if the improvement is not “backwards compatible.” For example, if a modification is inconsistent with existing protocols and versions, users may have to obtain an updated version to communicate with a participant implementing the modified version and/or seek organizations approval. The foregoing situation may inhibit acceptance of the modified technology.